This article discusses the theme and methodology of the course
“(Post-)Romantic Childhoods in British Literature” as previously taught at
Bielefeld University in Germany. The course covered constructions of childhood
in British literature from the Romantic period and their appropriations in
Victorian and contemporary fiction by Dickens, McEwan, Lessing, and Boyne.
Reflecting upon the teaching goals and outcomes, we draw on two fields of
research into contemporary literature: constructivist childhood studies and the
critical study of Romantic legacies. After an introduction to our terminology,
the cultural context, and its implications for classroom scenarios, we outline
the syllabus in detail, adding handouts, activities, and tasks as illustrative
examples.

Legacies of the Romantic Child: Teaching Post-Romantic Constructions of
Childhood in Contemporary British Fiction

Sandra Dinter and Stefanie JohnRWTH Aachen University and the University of Muenster

1. The ideal of childhood in contemporary Western cultures is a legacy of
Romanticism. Incarnations of the innocent child as once imagined by Blake,
Wordsworth, Coleridge and others are perceived as pervasive norms that
continue to inform discourses concerning children, including debates on
education, social policy, law, and media. This preoccupation with childhood
comes to the fore in a great number of British and Irish novels published
since the 1980s. This article addresses this recent trend and the
opportunities it creates for the teaching of contemporary literature in
English Studies degree courses. It presents the structure, methodology, and
content of an advanced undergraduate course on the legacies of the Romantic
child as previously taught at Bielefeld University in Germany. Reflecting
upon the course’s goals and outcomes, we unite two fields of research into
contemporary literature: constructivist childhood studies and the critical
study of responses to and appropriations of Romanticism, epitomized by the
notion of the post-Romantic. After an introduction to our terminology and
its implications for classroom scenarios, we will outline the syllabus.
Handouts, activities, and tasks will serve as illustrative examples, which
colleagues are welcome to adapt for their own teaching.

2. Contemporary Britain provides a gripping cultural and political context for
students’ enquiries into constructions of childhood. [1] Despite its
long-standing artistic celebration of childhood and ongoing political
investments into child welfare, the United Kingdom has frequently been
referred to as “a serious contender for the title of worst place in Europe
to be a child” (Micklewright and Stewart 23). Having recently received harsh
criticism in the assessment of children’s general well-being from the United
Nations and UNICEF (Kehily 7), the UK is notorious for its widespread child
poverty and its comparatively low age of criminal responsibility alongside
its unusually high number of young offenders held in custody (Wyness 73).
Moreover, the media coverage of events featuring binary constructions of
children as vicious perpetrators and as innocent victims, such as the public
condemnation of the two ten-year-old boys who murdered James Bulger in 1993
or the torture and death of Victoria Climbié in 2000, continue to fuel moral
panics. Phenomena such as the disintegration of traditional family
practices, excessive media consumption, juvenile delinquency, and bullying
are often construed as indicators of an apparent crisis of contemporary
childhood in Britain.

3. Since the 1980s, fiction from the British Isles has played a marked role in
negotiating these very issues. Acclaimed novels by such authors as Pat
Barker, A.S. Byatt, Roddy Doyle, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, and Ali Smith
have tackled the debates surrounding childhood. Many of these works depict
child characters’ subjectivities and attempt to convey cognitive development
through formal means, which are specifically available to the medium of
narrative, such as free indirect discourse and focalization. American,
Canadian, and Australian childhood novels by Emma Donoghue, Jonathan Safran
Foer, M.J. Hyland, and Lionel Shriver have been equally successful in the
British Isles. Besides fiction, autobiographical accounts of childhood have
enjoyed immense popularity in recent years. The contemporary childhood novel
is, moreover, explicitly marketed as an emerging subgenre, with a group of
leading authors in the field repeatedly commenting upon each other’s works
(Dinter 54). The course, “(Post-)Romantic Childhoods in British Literature,”
aimed to illustrate the remarkable thematic and formal variety in which the
novels respond to Romantic concepts of childhood, by reaffirming,
transforming, or subverting their precursors.

4. A crucial point of departure for the Romantics was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
understanding of childhood as a separate, formative period of life
characterized by a condition of natural innocence, as outlined in Emile (1762). Since, for Rousseau, civilization
immediately corrupts the state of natural goodness, he outlines an
educational program that would form and prolong childhood according to this
ideal. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, poetry by
William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as
books for children by Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and
Charles Lamb, appropriated the subject of childhood and turned it into a
prevalent literary concept of the period. In Blake’s Songs
of Innocence and of Experience, childhood emerges as an ideal
state of purity, authenticity, and spontaneity. Yet Blake always contrasts
the pastoral world of innocence displayed in poems such as “Laughing Song,”
“Nurse’s Song,” or “Infant’s Joy” with darker realms of experience, and his
poetry also speaks to the harsh social conditions for children of his time.
The child speaker in “The Chimney Sweeper,” (from Innocence) for instance, laments how “my father sold me while
yet my tongue, / Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep” (Blake 18).
Wordsworth’s poetry, too, incorporates pastoral child figures, often setting
them amid scenes of loss and death. The young girl in “We Are Seven,” for
instance, refuses to confront the facts of death on adult terms. Her
persistence first seems naïve, but comes, over the course of the poem, to
win out over the reductive, rational response of her interlocutor. In the
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” The Prelude, and
other works, Wordsworth employs childhood in distinctly autobiographical
contexts as a basis for explorations of memory and selfhood (cf.
introductory overviews by Chaplin; McGavran and Smith Daniel; McGillis).
Already these examples of two canonical poets suggest that no such thing as
one homogeneous, self-evident and fixed concept of “the Romantic child”
exists in the literature of the period. Although we are very much aware of
this variety, we employ the term “the Romantic child” as a perceived norm in
contemporary fiction. It is above all the celebratory stance, the idea of
childhood as a near-sacred stage of inherent yet transient goodness and
innocence, which has enjoyed powerful afterlives.

5. In our course, one major goal was that learners become familiar with
contemporary fiction’s wide spectrum of responses to this received Romantic
norm. A major section of the course addressed these responses in detail by
examining three thematically and formally disparate novels: Ian McEwan’s
The Cement Garden (1979), Doris Lessing’s
The Fifth Child (1988), and John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006). Discussions of
the novels drew on constructivist approaches to childhood. Such approaches
first emerged in the 1980s with the rise of the so-called “new sociology of
childhood.” Directed against a “widespread tendency to routinize and
‘naturalize’ childhood” in a variety of discourses in which it is “regarded
as necessary and inevitable, and thus part of normal life” (Jenks 7), the
most central assumption in this field is that childhood is a variable social
and cultural construct (Prout and James 8) determined by complex power
structures.

6. In literary studies, childhood is still predominately associated with the
study of children’s literature, although an increasing amount of research
into other literary genres has emerged in recent years under the heading of
“children in literature.” Several survey texts constitute helpful resources
for teachers and students and were consulted for the design of this course.
Adrienne E. Gavin’s edited volume The Child in British
Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to
Contemporary (2012) includes sixteen chapters dedicated to
specific literary and cultural contexts and epochs. The
Children’s Culture Reader (1998), edited by Henry Jenkins,
comprises central theoretical texts from a variety of disciplines. Karín
Lesnik-Oberstein’s volumes Children in Culture
(1998) and Children in Culture Revisited (2011)
contain a broad range of interdisciplinary contributions. Slightly older,
but nevertheless relevant monographs include Peter Coveney’s The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: A Study of
the Theme in English Literature (1967), Reinhard Kuhn’s Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western
Literature (1982), and Hugh Cunningham’s The
Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood Since the Seventeenth
Century (1991). Two monographs dealing specifically with modern
and contemporary fiction are Susan Honeyman’s Elusive
Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction (2005)
and Ellen Pifer’s Demon or Doll? Images of the Child in
Contemporary Writing and Culture (2000). James Holt McGavran’s
collections Literature and the Child: Romantic
Continuations, Postmodern Contestations (1999) and Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the
Literature of Childhood (2012) are two rare examples centering
on childhood from a post-Romantic perspective. The largest corpus of
secondary literature derives from scholarship on Romantic literature,
including, for instance, Judith Plotz’s Romanticism and the
Vocation of Childhood (2001) and Ann Wierda Rowland’s Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British
Literary Culture (2012).

7. It should not come as a surprise that this recent interest in constructions
of childhood in sociology and literary studies has been paralleled by a wave
of research focusing on the multifaceted legacies of and responses to
Romanticism. These studies have looked at cultural and literary afterlives
of Romanticism throughout Victorianism, Modernism, and Postmodernism.
Examples include Edward Larrissy’s volume Romanticism and
Postmodernism (1999), Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy’s Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era (2008), Carmen
Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell’s Legacies of Romanticism:
Literature, Culture, Aesthetics (2012), and Michael O’Neill’s
monograph The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and
Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900
(2007). While the interest in poetic inheritances of Romanticism is
certainly not a new phenomenon (cf. earlier publications by Bloom [1976] or
Bornstein [1976]), scholarship has broadened its scope as it regards the
cultural range of post-Romantic material examined, from poetry to pop music,
films, and fiction. Recent studies also increasingly point to the challenge
of defining Romanticism as a literary epoch and of conceptualizing the very
idea of its continuities or legacies.

8. This research therefore provides a second fruitful point of departure for
discussing contemporary fiction’s negotiation of “the Romantic child” in the
classroom. A term pervading these studies that may prove helpful is the
notion of the “post-Romantic.” This term, which has mostly been used in a
historical sense but has hardly been theoretically defined, lends itself
well as a structural category to describe the simultaneous affirmations of
and resistances to the “norm” of Romantic childhood as found in contemporary
novels. Through the prefix “post,” it puts emphasis on the (self-conscious)
awareness of historical and conceptual difference as viewed from the
perspective of the contemporary. As Michael O’Neill asserts, with regard to
twentieth-century poetry, “‘Post-Romantic’ is, in its way, as uncertain and
fluid a term as ‘Romantic’; it is a necessary term, however, since, even as
poets . . . seek to renew the Romantic for a later age, they are
conscious of differences from Romanticism” (10).

9. Reading negotiations of the “naturally” innocent child in post-1980s fiction
as post-Romantic thus highlights the self-conscious dimension of responses
to Romantic concepts in these texts. The notion of post-Romanticism enables
students to develop an awareness of literary epochs as heterogeneous
constructions, which emerge a posteriori and may change over
time. In this context, students may be invited to reflect on the importance
of maintaining a self-critical distance towards seemingly given concepts in
literary scholarship. The importance of such an awareness is of course a key
argument of Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology
(1985), which points to the risk encountered by any reader of Romantic—and,
indeed, post-Romantic—texts of pursuing an “uncritical absorption in
Romanticism’s own self-representations” (1).

Teaching (Post-)Romantic Childhoods: The Course

10. Our course on “(Post-)Romantic Childhoods in British Literature” was part of
the module “Advanced British Studies” designed for third year undergraduate
students at a German university. In order to be admitted to the degree
program Anglistik: British and American Studies,
which is taught entirely in English, students need to demonstrate advanced
skills in English (level C1/C2 of the Common European Framework of Reference
for Languages). The participants had practiced the analysis and discussion
of literary and historical texts in previous modules and had acquired a
basic overview of the literary history of the British Isles. They were thus
familiar with the tools and literary categories necessary for the analysis
and interpretation of poetry and narrative as well as a critical reception
of secondary literature. To a lesser extent, they had already engaged in
reading critical theory. Noteworthy in the specific context of post-Romantic
childhoods is the fact that most participants studied English literature as
part of a degree that would lead to the German postgraduate certificate in
secondary school teaching. The course was thus directly linked to the
practical dimensions of their future professional lives. Moreover, most
students would have encountered essentialist notions of childhood in their
pedagogy seminars, notions that our course sought to question.

11. Like most seminars at German universities, the course was taught on a weekly
basis for a total of fifteen weeks, with each session consisting of ninety
minutes. After the introductory seminar, two weeks were dedicated to
theoretical approaches to childhood. A historical overview prepared the
group for the engagement with Romantic constructions of childhood in the
subsequent three sessions, followed by a brief excursion into the legacy of
Romanticism in the Victorian era. The eighth session then moved over to
cover contemporary British culture and literature. The remaining seven weeks
were dedicated to the three contemporary novels before a final seminar
summarized what the students had learned. Three “study questions” were
assigned by the tutor in advance of each session (see appendix).

12. The introductory session included a group activity, in which students were
asked to define what they believed to constitute “childhood” and
“non-childhood” in a chart on a handout (see appendix). What became clear
through this exercise was that most students’ conceptions of childhood
corresponded to a simplified notion of Romantic childhood; often, however,
they were not aware of its origins. Furthermore, students’ definitions of
childhood always related to what they claimed to be its binary opposition:
adulthood. Students referred to aspects such as sexuality, political
participation, paid employment, education, and maturity as distinguishing
features of what they regarded as two poles. The chart exercise motivated
students to start thinking critically about their assumptions. In the final
seminar, they were asked to look at the chart again in order to reflect on
the learning outcomes. In addition, an enquiry into the course’s title
“(Post-)Romantic Childhoods in British Literature” intended to encourage
students to identify some of the leading questions and topics of the course
by problematizing the implications of the title’s three major concepts:
“Romantic,” “post-Romantic,” and “childhoods.”

13. For the next week, students prepared an excerpt of a seminal theoretical work
on childhood: Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood: A
Social History of Family Life (1960). Ariès, a representative of
the histoire des mentalités, is known as the founding
father of the constructivist approach. He claimed that the modern conception
of childhood as a separate stage in human life with distinct privileges and
restrictions arose as a product of a complex set of social transitions
active since the Renaissance, such as the formation of the private nuclear
family, the institutionalization of education, and newly emerging notions of
morality. Despite its massive impact, Ariès’s claims have been harshly
critiqued from a variety of angles. Students thus also read Roger Cox’s “The
Child in History: Introduction,” a short book chapter which outlines some of
the major points of attack. In addition, it proved productive to analyze
some of the paintings Ariès refers to in Centuries,
including Pieter Brueghel’s The Peasant Dance and
Peasant Wedding (both 1568), Hans Holbein’s
portrait of Prince Edward (ca. 1538), and the portrait of Barbara Sidney,
Countess of Leicester with six of her children painted by Marcus Gheeraerts
the Younger (c.1596). The group was asked to describe these pictures, paying
attention to aesthetic means, such as composition, colors, and perspective.
They noticed that children are constructed as miniature adults, wearing the
same clothes and engaging in the same activities as adults. At the same
time, they noticed that these paintings also function as prestigious status
symbols and cannot be taken as representations of a given reality, which is
exactly one of the major points of criticism concerning Ariès’s
methodology.

14. The second part of this block moved on to more recent theories. Students
prepared an excerpt from Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of
Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) as
well as the essay “Childhood Studies: Past, Present and Future” by Martin
Woodhead. Woodhead reflects upon transformations in research on childhood,
which eventually led to the constructivist paradigms of a disciplinary
conglomerate he labels “childhood studies.” We discussed these shifts,
related them to their previous reading of Ariès, and critically debated
Woodhead’s impetus of “‘child centered’ research” which is “built around
children’s agency, their rights and well-being” (25). This agenda partly
undermines a constructivist approach as it claims knowledge of “the child”
in a process that is, from the start, governed by adults. Rose’s text makes
a similar point as it deconstructs children’s fiction as:

a world in
which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes
after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the
space in between. To say that the child is inside the book—children’s
books are after all as often as not about children—is to
fall straight into a trap. It is to confuse the adult’s intention to get
at the child with the child it portrays. If children’s fiction builds an
image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the
child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily
within its grasp. (58, emphasis in original)

As this quotation
suggests, Rose problematizes numerous common assumptions about children’s
literature. In order to give students an idea of the heated debates Rose
triggered amongst scholars, a longer exercise consisted of reading part of
Perry Nodelman’s response entitled “The Case of Children’s Fiction: Or The
Impossibility of Jacqueline Rose” and relating it to the texts previously
read in class.

15. With these theoretical foundations in mind, the fourth seminar gave a broad
overview of changing conceptions of childhood in Britain in their social and
historical contexts. Harry Hendrick’s “Constructions and Reconstructions of
British Childhood: An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present” served as
the basis for discussion. Hendrick emphasizes the crucial role of ideology
and the desire for control pervading adult perspectives on what constitutes
a “proper” childhood (60). He thus introduces the function of constructions
of childhood as norms, a concept relevant to understanding the
lasting power of Romantic ideas of the child in literary texts. Powerpoint
slides helped to summarize the central authoritative constructions of
childhood listed by Hendrick (including, for example, the “Natural” and the
“Romantic child,” the “delinquent child,” the “schooled child,” the “child
of the nation,” and the “psychological child”). In a group exercise,
students worked with two documents that exemplified Hendrick’s claims: an
extract from Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and John
Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693).
As the authors and origin of the text passages were not given to the
students, they had to deduct which of Hendrick’s concepts the respective
text advocated and guess the authors themselves.

16. This overview paved the way for two weeks focusing on literature from the
Romantic period. For the fifth session, students prepared a section from
Aidan Day’s introduction to Romanticism that focuses on “Constructions of
the term ‘Romantic’” as well as three of Wordsworth’s shorter lyric poems,
“We are Seven,” “Lucy Gray,” and “My Heart Leaps up When I Behold.” The
chronology was reversed here and Blake was discussed in the subsequent week,
so that a full seminar could be devoted to the Songs of
Innocence and of Experience. Day’s chapter served to reactivate
students’ prior knowledge of the Romantic period and its key authors,
concepts, and literary practices. Day also emphasizes the fact that literary
epochs are always conceptualized retrospectively: “the identification and
historical description of a named British Romantic movement really began to
take shape only in the second half of the [nineteenth] century” (87). This
insight may help students more generally to understand how childhood came to
be associated prominently with the Romantics. Powerpoint slides helped to
briefly outline concepts such as the sublime, the elevation of the poet as
prophet, and the poetic focus on subjectivity and authenticity. Some of
these issues could be linked to ideas of childhood as encountered earlier in
the seminar series, for example in Hendrick’s text. The second half of the
seminar was then dedicated to Wordsworth’s poems. The aim was to highlight
his use of natural motifs in relation to children, the role of the
autobiographical self, and the function of the seeming simplicity of verse
structures and other linguistic features that support the idea of childhood
as a superior state, which is celebrated by the speaker. The advantage of
Wordsworth’s shorter works for the teaching scenario was clearly the
accessibility of these texts in terms of vocabulary and structure. The Prelude, the Immortality Ode, and other longer
works were briefly introduced by the lecturer and suggested as possible
topics for student essays.

17. The next seminar then took a chronological step backwards, looking at Blake’s
Songs of Innocence and of Experience in their
entirety. At home, the students had researched the pastoral tradition and
acquired contextual information on Blake’s illustration and writing
practices from Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant’s introduction to the
Songs (Blake 811). They were also asked to
think about similarities and differences between the introductory poems to
the volume’s two sections, which helped to explore the opposing states of
innocence and experience. Divided into five groups, the class studied “The
Lamb,” “Little Black Boy,” and “The Chimney Sweeper” from the Innocence section, as well as “Holy Thursday” and “The
School Boy” from the Experience section. The form
and content of Blake’s seemingly simple yet symbolically charged lyrics were
analysed, with special attention paid to their uses and their
functionalization of childhood. Similarities with and differences to
Wordsworth were examined, for example with regard to the function of the
lyrical persona, religious motifs, and the hymn-like structure of many of
Blake’s “songs.”

18. Having thus covered some canonical Romantic conceptualizations of childhood,
while also pointing out differences among poets, the course then took a
brief excursion into the Victorian period, taking as a point of focus
Chapters I to IV of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist
(1837–39). The novel was introduced as central to the ambivalent
“cult” of childhood in Victorian literature and culture. The Victorians were
also the first in England to establish the idea of Romanticism as a literary
movement as such—in a way, acting as posthumous creators of the Romantics.
Finally, Dickens constitutes an initial canonical example for discussing
post-Romantic textual strategies—how authors adopt, but also extend or
subvert aspects of Wordsworth’s or Blake’s Romantic childhoods. The session
was introduced with a historical contextualization of the themes covered in
Oliver Twist. The class gained a more profound
idea of the miserable condition of the lower classes in Victorian England,
looking at the situation in the workhouses and key government policies, such
as the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. The classroom discussion of the novel
was partly informed by an article on childhood in Dickens by Robert Newsom,
who delineates but also questions Dickens’s decisive role in perpetuating
Romantic ideas of childhood in fiction. The students examined the beginning
of Oliver Twist in regard to its melodramatic
sentimentalizing of the child character, its use of an authorial narrator
and irony, hyperbole, and other tropes. While the class easily recognized
continuations from Wordsworth’s and Blake’s works, they also reflected on
alterations in comparison to Romantic constructions of the child. These were
also related to the different characteristics and techniques of the social
novel as opposed to poetry.

19. The subsequent session left the nineteenth century behind and addressed the
current state of childhood in Britain. An inquiry into the alleged crisis of
childhood from the Thatcher years up to the present day provided the first
thematic focus. Students began by reading a copy of the entry “Disappearance
of Loss of Childhood” from Allison James and Adrian James’s Key Concepts in Childhood Studies. James and James refer to
Neil Postman’s thesis that there has been a disappearance of childhood in
contemporary society based on the transition from textual to visual media.
Students were asked to scrutinize some of the rather problematic arguments
Postman provides and to formulate counter-arguments to his hypothesis. They
referred to the opposing thesis of a prolongation of childhood and
adolescence in late modernity, the datedness of Postman’s argument in the
age of the digital revolution as well as his ignorance regarding children’s
media literacies. Students were then asked to debate how Phil Scraton’s more
nuanced texts and the newspaper article by Amelia Hill et al. position
themselves towards the notion of a crisis of childhood and what historical
factors and incidents they refer to. Then the discussion shifted to
literature. Of particular interest were Katherina Dodou’s claims that
“[w]hat is particular about contemporary fiction is the prevalence of the
aim to scrutinize the idea that the child is inherently innocent and that
this innocence is precious and worth protecting” and that “the contemporary
novel invites an approach to the child that views it as an artifact” (239,
249). These claims clearly relate to Romantic notions of childhood as
previously discussed in class. Furthermore, Dodou points to a
“self-consciousness” of contemporary texts concerning their literary
precursors, which provides an overarching theme according to which one could
analyze the three contemporary novels.

20. The first of these novels was Ian McEwan’s The Cement
Garden (1979). Narrated retrospectively by Jack, the eldest
brother, the novella depicts a summer in the lives of four siblings who
decide to encase their mother’s corpse in cement in the basement of their
house instead of informing the local authorities of her death. Without any
parental supervision, the children engage in a series of transgressive
activities, which climax in sexual intercourse between Jack and Julie, the
eldest sister. Whilst obviously breaking with the ideal of childhood as a
state of innocence, the novella equally perpetuates and partially perverts
simplified notions of Romantic childhood. This shows in the child
characters’ primitivism, their utopian spirit, and the nature vs. nurture
debate, captured in the once highly stylized and later overgrown garden.
After a brief introduction to McEwan’s life and the prevalence of the theme
of childhood in his oeuvre (based on Childs), the first exercise consisted
of a close reading of the novella’s first paragraph. The students recognized
that the paragraph introduces several of the central conflicts and sets up
the particular style of Jack’s narration. Further exercises included an
analysis of the novella’s constructions and transformations of spaces and
temporalities. Noteworthy aspects are the role of the basement as the sphere
of the unconscious and the repressed, the garden as a symbol of patriarchy,
and the fairytale-like atmosphere evoked by images of sleep and references
to timelessness, which prompted several students to a Freudian reading. The
lecturer used the opportunity to point out the significant ramifications
Freudian psychoanalysis brought about in the twentieth century by
introducing theories of infant sexuality. An analysis of McEwan’s
constructions of gender and sexuality followed, including the power struggle
between Jack and Julie, the employment of the male gaze, Tom’s cross
dressing, and the idea of original sin.

21. The next novel considered was Doris Lessing’s The Fifth
Child (1988), published only nine years after The Cement Garden, at the height of Thatcherism in Britain.
Often interpreted as a Gothic narrative (Anievas Gamallo 115), the novella
focuses on the couple Harriet and David Lovatt whose family idyll shatters
when their eponymous fifth child Ben is born. Narrated by a third-person
narrator and internally focalized through Harriet (and thus formally
distinct from The Cement Garden) Lessing’s novella
constructs Ben as a deviant, violent, and opaque child. Ben’s perspective,
in contrast, is left out. The aim of the first session was to read Ben as an
allegorical figure against the backdrop of Thatcherism, as initiated by one
of the study questions. As various scholars have noted, Ben can be viewed as
“figure of the ‘enemy within’” (Yelin 104) as “Lessing utilizes the
xenophobic paranoia characteristic of Britain in the aftermath of the
Falklands War as a departure point for a comprehensive satirical dismantling
of the contradictions and paradoxes that render Thatcherism unsustainable
and doom it to collapse” (Brock 7). After a broad introduction to the 1980s
in Britain, students analyzed the Lovatt family as a microcosm of
Thatcherism (Brock 7).

22. The subsequent session drew attention to the issue of childhood as it focused
on Ben and his constellation to the other child characters. In a close
reading of Ben’s birth (Lessing 59–62), students explored the strategies and
metaphorical language the narrator employs to construct Ben as “the other.”
At this point the tutor also introduced Freud’s notion of “the uncanny” as a
possible approach to read his otherness. Afterwards, students compared the
literary construction of Ben to his siblings Helen, Luke, and Paul whose
“fair hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks” (27) can be read as a
stereotypical reference to Romantic imagery of childhood. The major aim of
this exercise was to make students aware of the fact that Lessing
self-consciously juxtaposes and complicates different constructions of
childhood. Whereas Ben clearly deviates from the norm of the innocent and
endearing child, he nevertheless remains the novel’s center of attention; by
contrast, the other child characters do not advance beyond their status as
rather underdeveloped archetypes.

23. The final two sessions on contemporary fiction dealt with John Boyne’s
controversial The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006)
and its 2008 film adaptation by Mark Herman. The novel is set in Nazi
Germany, a challenging and problematic context for negotiating childhood. It
concerns the unlikely friendship between Bruno, the nine-year-old son of an
SS officer, and Shmuel, a Jewish boy imprisoned in a death camp. Again
narrated by a third-person narrator and internally focalized through Bruno,
the novel instrumentalizes and exaggerates concepts of childhood innocence
and ignorance as Bruno displays no knowledge whatsoever of the Nazi regime.
Two study questions prepared the students for a discussion of the allegation
that the novel downplays the cruelty of the Holocaust. In addition, they
were asked to come up with two study questions themselves and to post them
on the course’s e-learning platform.

24. Bearing the controversies in mind, the first session on Boyne also gave
students time to reflect on whom they considered to be the novel’s target
audience, based on its narrative techniques, plot, and themes. The novel can
be approached as a work of crossover fiction, being marketed for children
and adult readers. The following seminar then looked in
more detail at the sentimental functionalization of Romantic childhood by
means of character construction, narrative perspective, and setting. These
issues were taken up again when discussing excerpts of the film adaptation
of the novel. Here, the students could practice translating their acquired
knowledge about childhood from narrative texts to film. Participants
examined how the film struggles to approximate the novel’s construction of
the child characters’ strikingly limited capacity to “see,” evident, for
example, in Bruno’s inability to interpret the symbolic meaning of the
swastika.

25. The final week concluded the course by returning to the chart on “childhood”
and “non-childhood” compiled in week one, an exercise that enabled students
to revise their original preconceptions about childhood. In order to
recapitulate the knowledge acquired throughout the course, groups worked on
an unmarked end of term quiz, which included one question for each week’s
contents. Based on the seminar group’s feedback and the tutor’s own
reflections, we can conclude that the course achieved most of its goals. The
students appreciated that the subject of childhood serves as a point of
departure to explore a great variety of socio-political contexts (e.g., the
Victorian workhouse and the New Right in Britain), theoretical approaches
(e.g., the history of mentalities and psychoanalysis), and aesthetic and
formal concepts (e.g., the sublime and the pastoral). They also found the
study questions particularly helpful. A point of criticism was the high
workload, particularly the lengthy texts. From the tutor’s point of view, it
can be noted that the particular design of this course afforded a great
amount of preparation and marking. This was largely due to the size of the
group (forty students), which made it difficult to include more
learner-centered activities, such as student presentations. Whereas in the
class discussions students demonstrated a profound understanding of the
constructivist approach, some of the essays still displayed essentialist
notions of childhood. This could be seen as a consequence of the demanding,
often meta-theoretical, issues addressed in this course. It must also be
admitted that the course excluded over one hundred and fifty years of
British literary history between the early Victorian period and the present,
which could also have been studied in terms of post-Romantic engagements
with childhood. However, as we hope to have shown, the topic of
post-Romantic childhoods provides further scope for both research and
teaching.

Works Cited

Anievas Gamallo, Isabel C. “Motherhood and the Fear of the Other: Magic,
Fable and the Gothic in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth
Child.” Theme Parks, Rainforests and Sprouting
Wastelands: European Essays on Theory and Performance in Contemporary
British Fiction, edited by Richard Todd and Luisa Flora,
Costerus New Series 123, Rodopi, 2000, pp.113–25.

Dodou, Katherina. “Examining the Idea of Childhood: The Child in the
Contemporary British Novel.” The Child in British
Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to
Contemporary, edited by Adrienne E. Gavin, Palgrave Macmillan,
2012, pp. 238–50.

Dunne, Joseph, and James Kelly, eds. Childhood and Its
Discontents: The First Seamus Heaney Lectures. Liffey P,
2003.

Hendrick, Harry. “Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood:
An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present.” Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, edited by Allison
James and Alan Prout, Routledge Falmer, 1997, pp. 34–63.

Hill, Amelia, Caroline Davies, and Gaby Hinsliff. “Are Our Children Really
in Crisis, or the Victims of Parents’ Anxiety?” The
Observer, 1 February 2009. Accessed 5 March 2013.

Pifer, Ellen. Demon or Doll? Images of the Child in
Contemporary Writing and Culture. UP of Virginia, 2000.

Plotz, Judith. Romanticism and the Vocation of
Childhood. Palgrave, 2001.

Prout, Alan, and Allison James. “A New Paradigm for the Sociology of
Childhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems.” Constructing
and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological
Study of Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout,
RoutledgeFalmer, 2006, pp. 7–33.

Notes

[1] It must be noted that the syllabus included a novel by
the Irish author John Boyne, which is, however, not particularly
relevant for the novel’s rendering of childhood. Depictions of childhood
in a specifically Irish context would undoubtedly constitute a
fascinating subject for research and teaching, too (Frank McCourt’s
memoir Angela’s Ashes comes to mind) but could
not be included here. Colleagues who are interested in Irish
childhood(s) may refer to Dunne and Kelly. BACK